Death of a Nation

American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

David W. Noble

Publication Year: 2002

In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career. Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation’s history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative postnational narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges that the paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.

Title Page, Other Works in the Series, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Foreword: The Unpredictable Creativity of David Noble

...nation and its collective imagination. Like most historians, he concerns himself with change over time, with what can be learned once we realize that part of “what things are” lies in “how they came to be.” But...

Introduction: Space Travels

...in a scholarly revolution that, for them, had begun in the 1960s. At that point, American studies as an academic discipline was only thirty years old. The 1960s revolutionists, as the contributors saw them in 2000, were...

ONE: The Birth and Death of American History

...tradition that moved from Renaissance Italy into the English colonies. Now, in this book, I am placing this theory that time and space are dichotomies within the transatlantic bourgeois culture, which, by...

TWO: Historians Leaving Home, Killing Fathers

...in 1968, he described it as an act of parricide. He believed that he had cut himself off from the historians who were most important to him in the 1930s, the literary historian Vernon Lewis Parrington as well as Turner...

THREE: The Crisis of American Literary Criticism from World War I to World War II

...of the Appalachian Mountains. The suddenness of this change in the aesthetic foundations of national identity is symbolically dramatized by whom the members of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association...

FOUR: Elegies for the National Landscape

...the Minnesota English department and give intellectual substance to the new American Studies Program. But perhaps because the United States, once again, was committed to war in Europe in 1941, McDowell...

FIVE: The New Literary Criticism: The Death of the Nation Born in New England

...landscapes. These landscapes were given substance as the variety of artists gave them representation. The orthodoxy of modern nationalism insisted that the purpose of art was to represent the recently discovered and...

SIX: The Vanishing National Landscape: Painting, Architecture,Music, and Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century

SEVEN: The Disintegration of National Boundaries: Literary Criticism in the Late Twentieth Century

...Program. I believe this participation was crucial to the development of my focus on the role of a concept of space for the dominant culture. In contact with colleagues and graduate students who were interested in...

Epilogue

...The story I have told about the triumph of cultural anthropology in the writing of literary criticism and history since the 1960s is filled with irony. In contrast to these academic cultures, the dominant political...

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